


Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me

by saltzatore



Series: Seasons of my soul [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-06
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 03:37:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltzatore/pseuds/saltzatore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's life in a nutshell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Life

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted under my former pen name Mikiya2200.

 

__ Because I could not stop for Death,  
he kindly stopped for me.   
The carriage held but just ourselves.  
And immortality. 

  
** Emily Dickinson **

 

  


The concept of time had always been difficult to grasp for him.

Back in Nam, time was a constant shift from endless moments stretching like chewing gum stuck to a shoe to flashes of reality changing so fast your mind never had a chance to catch up. One minute you would be dozing off to the sound of mosquitoes buzzing so loudly you could barely hear yourself think, only to jerk awake to people moving, staying low, shouting orders, calling names and listening for answers that never came.

Time was dangerous then, minutes never lasted for sixty seconds and the next night was always exactly a life time away.

Then he came back to the real world and met her. Everything changed; suddenly everything was different, better. Waiting for something—the job to be over for the day, a drink in a bar, the traffic light to change to green—it never scared him, never made him feel anxious or afraid for his life. He settled down; found a place to live and a family to spend his life with. Looking back, later, he would remember those years as the perfect period of his life, the only time in his life when he could spend a whole night sleeping peacefully without having nightmares, without that mind-numbing, ever-present fear of losing it. Losing them.

He was happy, content, right where he had always wanted to be.

Until that fateful night when everything stopped, screeched to a halt with a wordless cry in the middle of the night. Fire, heat, blood dripping from the ceiling… and she was gone. He was left behind with two little boys who would never truly remember what they had lost that night and a taint to his very own soul that he could never get rid of. He became restless again, he lost what little understanding he’d had for the passage of time and watched, detachedly, how days turned into months, years, decades until he couldn’t tell them apart anymore.

The boys grew older and, over the years, he grew numb.

Time became tangible again, if a lot simpler somehow. It could be easily defined by what he was doing at any given moment. Time spent on a hunt. Time spent on the way to or from the hunt, on research, on down-time to heal from injuries. Time he should have spent with the boys but always ended up wasting on something else. He lost track of days and started thinking in monsters. Sometimes he would think about how going after zombies always took longer than burning a corpse to put a ghost to rest. Or how he could ward an entire building against imps in the same time it took him to locate and destroy a black dog. He wasn’t part of time anymore, he existed outside of it, but he didn’t care; he got the job done, no matter how long it took.

Eventually he found a trail— _the_ trail. He found out what he had been hunting all those years, put together a pattern he could trace and started living from day to day again. The waiting started, too, familiar nightmares of being attacked if he ever slowed down long enough to take a rest, shocking him awake at nights. He was back on the battlefield of a war he would never fully understand, and he started tracking, researching, hunting.

And then the demon found them.

It happened so fast he could barely keep track of everything. Their friends were dying, his son was able to see the future and he had to send his kids onto a suicide-mission that should have been his final triumph over the thing that had taken everything from them.

But instead of finally putting an end to it, once and for all, he got himself kidnapped and became a prisoner. Trapped in his own body, floating helplessly somewhere in the background of his own mind while the demon had taken over, he spent daysminutesyears fighting for control. He saw flashes of his boys, heard his own voice talk to them, was forced to watch them being tortured in front of his eyes until it was too much and he finally found his voice.

You shoot me in the heart, son.

He struggled with all his might to hold the demon back, to give his boy the chance to end it all. He didn’t care about time then, didn’t care whether he would have to spend an eternity fighting to hold it back. All he cared about was for the nightmare to finally come to an end.

It never did.

Time moved on, no matter how hard he prayed for it to be over. Pain, agony, the demon getting away, a dark road, arguing—

_– there’s a bad moon on the rise –_

– and then nothing.

When he woke up in hospital and Sam told him about Dean slipping away from them with every second that passed, with no real chance of surviving, he knew. He knew his own time would be up, soon, even before he and Sam fought about his priorities, about _the same selfish obsession_. The minute he picked up the chalk and drew the demon’s real name on the floor, he knew he wouldn’t get out of it, even before the thing asked him to _sweeten the pot._

And suddenly there wasn’t enough time left, a few minutes at best, no chance to tell them what they needed to know, what he had found out. He was scared, trading his life for his son was the easiest decision he had ever made and still he didn’t want to go, not like this, leaving his children behind, on their own, without someone to protect them. He had never wanted to just roll over and die, to go down without a fight; it was never supposed to end like this.

But he couldn’t stop it. It was either his revenge or Dean’s life; and that wasn’t much of a choice. He met the bastard who had taken his life from him in so many different ways. He gave him the Colt and didn’t fight back when the demon ended what had started so many years ago.

The last thing his eyes ever saw were yellow eyes watching, gleefully, how his knees buckled and he collapsed to the floor, scared shitless, _dying_ and losing a fight he wasn’t prepared to lose. He died without so much as a whimper of protest; and when it was over—supposed to be over—he had to realize:

It wasn’t.

  


________________________________________________


	2. Death

Time wasn’t a constant; it wasn’t a measuring system to keep track of changes. He either was or he wasn’t. He couldn’t tell how long either period lasted, nor could he do anything but suffer through whatever was being done to him.   
  
If he was  _aware_ , reality was agony, red, screaming, blood, pain—everywhere, encompassing him, defining him. Every time he thought it was over, every time there was nothing left to carve, to tear, to slice into, every time he thought this was finally it—he would be whole again.   
  
And it would start all over.   
  
But there was something worse than the pain, and the carving, and the slicing, worse than going through it over and over and over again. Worse than any of this was the feeling of being helpless, of not being able to fight back, of  _having to endure_ . Even in the worst situations in Nam, even when Mary had died that night, even when the demon had been using him as a meat-suit, he had raged against it, fought to strike back, he had never given up.   
  
Here, wherever he was, he wasn’t strong enough. He couldn’t comprehend what was happening to him. There was no concept, no stability, no sense to this world. It was tearing him apart, in every sense of the word. Every time he was put back together, there was a part of him missing. He was fading, his sense of self was diming and he was powerless to stop it. He tried to hold on, to put up some sort of resistance and not let it destroy him but, as time wore on, he wasn’t sure if he could do it, if he could win.   
  
Until the moment in which he was screaming and then he wasn’t and everything changed.   
  
Again.   
  
Consciousness, the awareness of who he was slammed back into him like a punch to the gut. He was pulled out of a floating nothingness and back into existence. His body wanted to gasp at the abruptness of it all, at the sudden, strong, overwhelming sense of wrong, of not-supposed-to-be-here that assaulted him, left him reeling, confused, dazed.   
  
But he couldn’t, he couldn’t make a sound, he couldn’t move, he simply existed, suspended between one moment and the next. There was someone—some _thing_  close by and it was aware of him. It was watching him. He knew instinctively that it was dangerous to be in the center of that focus but as much as he tried to shift, to get away, to hide, he couldn’t move his arms or his legs. He couldn’t even turn his head to check if they were still there.   
  
Eventually, the attention shifted, switched away from him to who knew what else, as if it had lost all interest in him, in his non-existent struggles. He felt that shift like a heavy, smothering blanket that was lifted off his senses, like a presence that left his side. For the first time in ages he could breathe freely again, even though there was no rush of oxygen into his lungs. He didn’t like it; the lack of reactions from his body was starting to unnerve him, as if his mind was trying to explain reality to him by having him think he still had a body, although his senses were telling him he didn’t. As if his memories of how his body was supposed to react were fighting with the realization of what he was no longer capable of. The resulting feeling of disconcerting helplessness scared the hell out of him.   
  
He wanted to leave.   
  
No, he  _needed_ to get the heck out of there, as fast as possible, before he lost it. Whatever there was left to lose.   
  
He knew he would get out. He knew he didn’t belong there. The feeling intensified so quickly he was suddenly drowning in it. It became so strong it turned into a need to be anywhere but there, a need so powerful it became the sole focus of his thoughts, his reality, his existence.   
  
He wasn’t aware that he started to move. At first nothing changed around him but after a while he realized he was floating toward a direction. He was getting lighter, moving away…   
  
Until something sharp ripped into him from all sides and held him back. He tried to scream from the pain but he couldn’t. He tried to flinch away from it but there was nowhere to go. It soon turned into some kind of a struggle, a surreal tug o’ war with his sanity being the rope. He didn’t know the rules to that game. He couldn’t help, couldn’t act, couldn’t do anything but hang there, trapped between up and down, back and forth, here and there.   
  
It hurt, it was worse than anything he had gone through before. It got so bad that his mind started screaming at him to give up, to surrender and hope it would just stop then. It was too much. It felt like his soul was stretched beyond its limits and soon, too soon he wouldn’t be able to hold on. There was no way he could do this much longer—   
  
But he did. He didn’t let go. He didn’t lose his hold on his sanity. He clung to it with every single piece of determination he still possessed. He wouldn’t go without a fight, not again, not this time. He fought back with everything he had, every ounce of willpower he could drag up.   
  
And then there was light.   
  
Movement, sound—screaming, growling, cursing in languages he didn’t know but could understand instinctively—battering at him from all sides. There were others like him, not really there, not corporeal, but straining to leave, to get away. They rolled over him like a giant, faceless wave that dragged him under, threw him to the ground where he lay, stunned, trying to make sense of his surroundings.   
  
There was what felt like a tunnel with an open door at one end, and they were moving toward it. He didn’t know where the door led, what was behind it, but he knew that he would be safe on the other side. He knew it was where he had to go, where everyone was trying to get. He scrambled to move up, get on top of the writhing mass of blackness. Before he knew it, he was growling back at them, clawing at everything he could to get up from the bottom, fighting for control. Nobody was playing fair. It was a constant struggle for the top and he was right in the middle of it. He had trained for this. After God knew how long of feeling helpless and weak, he could finally do something about his situation and so he did. He had no idea how it worked but he no longer cared, all that mattered was that he was getting better at fighting like this, and soon he was on the top of the writhing mass. He made progress, slowly, but it was there, he got closer to the door. He sensed that this was the only chance he would ever get, and he didn’t care what he had to do, how many other beings he had to push back to get there.   
  
It all happened so fast in the end. One moment he was pushing something that was trying to bury its claws into his back as far away from him as he could, the next second everything changed.   
  
He could see again. It was the first thing that registered. There was no longer the feeling of a tunnel around him or the idea of a door at the end of it. He was seeing real trees and headstones and grass on the ground—his shoes, he could see his shoes again, and he almost went down from the pure shock of seeing them again. Blurry shapes pushed past him, disappeared from his sight as he stood numbly for a moment and tried to understand what was happening. He stared at the ground, then at his hand, moved it experimentally to touch his chest and froze when he felt the fabric of his shirt beneath his fingers.   
  
Thunder rolled in the distance, snapping his attention to the direction it was coming from, and he gradually became aware of more sounds, an eerie hissing noise in the background, feral growling behind him that made the hair at the back of his neck stand up. He started to turn—   
  
“Dean!”   
  
The voice was desperate, panicked and so familiar he wouldn’t have needed to turn around to see who it was.   
  
_Sam_ .   
  
He spun around so fast he almost lost his balance and there was his son, running toward him in a sprint. Sam looked panicked, downright freaked, and he didn’t slow down. He was already too close for him to get out of the way. Reflexes had him squeeze his eyes shut and wait for the collision but it never came. Sam’s footstep approached him and then ran away from him without ever missing a step. When he blinked his eyes open, his son was gone from his line of sight.   
  
“What the—“   
  
His own voice sounded alien to him. He hadn’t talked for so long, he barely recognized it. He turned and watched Sam running across a… field—a graveyard—toward a human shaped figure, a black form he recognized immediately, even from the distance.    
  
It was the demon. Azazel.    
  
The demon was standing with his back toward them, looking down at something hidden behind a grave stone. It looked different than the last time he had seen it. Back then, the demon had hidden in a human shell, only the yellow eyes giving away his identity. The body, the host, was still the same but now he could see the dark, fog-like mass that was the demon itself as well. It looked as if it was wrapped around the human outline, black tendrils curling around the limbs, pulling at them, making them move in a sick version of a puppeteer. And yet, the body never stuttered, never stopped in its movement. It was sickening to watch, and he couldn’t tell how long he just stood there, staring at the gruesome spectacle.   
  
But then, one of the arms jerked upright und Sam skittered to a stop, was flung backwards, crashing into a tree behind him. Immediately he started straining against something invisible, face pulled into a grimace of anger and desperation.   
He was drawn to his son’s side, the need to get between the threat and his boy pulling him toward Sam’s side, close enough to touch. He reached out to put a hand on Sam’s shoulder, to get his son’s attention, but he couldn’t. His hand went through the shoulder as if it wasn’t there. Next to him, Sam gasped softly but didn’t look at him, didn’t appear to see him or feel him. His eyes stayed glued to a spot across from them.   
_  
Sam?_   
  
He had meant to say his name, to speak it out loud, but it didn’t happen. Nothing came out of his mouth. There was no sound at all.   
  
“Dean…”   
  
Sam’s sudden voice made him flinch and Sam doubled his efforts to get free before he slumped back down and gave a frustrated growl.   
  
He followed his kid’s line of sight and found the demon crouching next to Dean. His older son was cowering on the ground, blinking dazedly up at the dead body of the demon next to him. A bloody gash ran over his forehead and he appeared to be under a spell as well. He didn’t move from where he was leaning against a stone.   
  
“Dean!” Sam gasped again and suddenly he could feel his son’s need to help his brother crawl down his back, so strong, so urgent it became his own. He didn’t hesitate, he started moving, focused on the swirling black mass that was wrapped around the dead body in front of Dean.   
  
As he got closer, he could hear the demon talking in a low voice to Dean, too low actually to make out what he was saying. Before he could reach it, the possessed body moved back and raised an arm and in the next second it had the Colt pointed at Dean.   
  
He didn’t think anymore, there was no plan at the back of his mind. He simply dove ahead, his mind focused on getting that thing away from his boy. He lunged forward, throwing himself at the black, swirling mass, locking his arms around it. As soon as he touched it, anger pulsed through him, irritation that wasn’t his own and threatened to overwhelm him immediately, causing him to stagger under the force of it. He lurched back and pulled the demon with him, ripping the vile fog from the dead body. Dimly he heard something collapse to the floor but he didn’t stop to look, couldn’t afford to concentrate on anything other than keeping a hold of the demon bucking in his arms.   
  
He wasn’t strong enough, though. Too soon the demon threw him off and he was flung back, landing on the floor in the grass near a metal fence. He lay there, dazed, somehow weak, watching helplessly how the black mass shot back into the body with an inhuman screech of rage that would have pierced his eardrums if he still had them.   
  
Everything happened in a flash then. Time did a weird surge forward, the demon got back onto his feet before he knew it and turned on his older son. And while he was still frozen in terror, a shot rang out.   
  
Time stood still.   
  
Images flashed before his mind. He was back at Sam’s nursery, watching his wife burn on the ceiling, smelling the blood, the fire, feeling the heat, hearing it tear into the furniture, into the walls with a hungry growl and then the pictures picked up speed—him trying to start a life after, his kids watching him with sad eyes, Dean not speaking, Sammy crying all the time, Missouri lifting the veil, the first hunt, training researching _hunting_ gettingstronger _raisinghiskids_ findingthefirsttrail _thecabin_ thedeal—   
  
It was over.   
  
Just like that.   
  
The dead body collapsed, again, as it had before, the black mass swirling about it in a frenzy, trying to break out, to flee from it, but it couldn’t.   
  
And then it was gone. It was over.   
  
He got to his feet in a daze, couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dead body—from the empty corpse—   
  
_Oh my God…  
Dad?_   
  
His sons’ voices drifted toward him, soft, unbelieving, shocked. And then Dean was there, in front of him, staring at him wide-eyed. He wasn’t sure but he thought he looked back just as bewildered and attempted a smile, surprised at how easy it came to his lips.   
  
_Over, it’s_ over _, I can rest now…_   
  
Something drew him closer to his boy and he reached out, placed a hand on Dean’s shoulder, and this time he felt a warm, shaking shoulder beneath his hand. He didn’t grab through him, he made contact. And his smile grew wider, just as Dean’s eyes grew even bigger, unbelieving, maybe hopeful.   
  
_You did it,_ he tried to say,  _you ended it. It’s over._   
  
But the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t remember how to form them, how to get them out.   
  
But Dean seemed to understand. He smiled back tentatively.   
  
_Dad?_   
  
Sam’s presence bled into his senses and he turned, hand still on Dean’s shoulder, to look at his youngest. Sam was standing a few feet away as if he dared not come closer, eyes even bigger than Dean’s.   
  
_Is this real?_   
  
He couldn’t help but smile. Sam nodded slowly, reluctantly, and he found himself mimicking the movement because it was real, and it was over, and both his boys had done it, and were still standing, after everything. He had never been more proud of them, both of them. There was so much he wanted to say to them, to tell them, but he knew, somehow he knew he couldn’t stay. He had to leave. He had no more reason not to go. The demon was dead, his life had finally come full circle and he was…  _free_ , he could rest.   
  
His gaze flicked back to Dean and he nodded again, unaware of the tears streaming down his face when he took a step back and then another and stood there, watching his boys and doing the one thing he had fought against his whole life.   
  
And the world disappeared in a swirl of light.   



End file.
